A German physician of some note once gave it out as his solemn
conviction that civilized man is gradually but surely losing the
sense of smell through disuse. It is a fact that we have noses less
keen than the savages; which is well for us, for we have a dozen
“well-defined and several” bad odors to their one. It is possible,
indeed, that it is to the alarming prevalence of bad odors that our
olfactory inferiority is in some degree due: civilized man’s habit
of holding his nose has begotten in that organ an obedient habit of
holding itself. This by the way, leaves both his hands free to hold his
tongue, though as a rule he prefers to make another and less pleasing
use of them. With a nose dowered with primitive activity civilized man
would find it difficult to retain his supremacy over the forces of
Nature; her assassinating odors would engage him in a new struggle for
existence, incomparably more arduous than any of which he has present
experience. And herein we get an intimation of a hitherto unsuspected
cause of the rapid decadence of savage peoples when brought into
contact with civilization. Various causes doubtless are concerned,
but the slaughter-house, the glue factory, the gas main, the sewer
and the other sources of exhalations that “rise like the steam of
rich-distilled perfumes” (which in no other quality they resemble) are
the actual culprits. Unprepared with a means of defense at the point
where he is most accessible to assault, the reclaimed savage falls into
a decline and accepting the Christian religion for what he conceives it
to be worth, turns his nose to the wall and dies in the secret hope of
an inodorous eternity.
With effacement of the sense of smell we shall doubtless lose the
feature which serves as intake to what it feeds upon; and that will in
many ways be an advantage. It will, for example, put a new difficulty
in the way of that disagreeable person, the caricaturist—rather, it
will shear him of much of his present power. The fellow never tires
of furnishing forth the rest of us incredibly snouted in an infinite
variety of wicked ways. When noses are no more, caricature will have
stilled some of its thunder and we can all venture to be eminent.
Meantime, history is full of noses, as is the literature of
imagination—some of them figuratively, some literally, shining beacons
that splendor “the dark backward and abysm of time.” Of the world’s
great, it may almost be said that by their noses we know them. Where
would have been Cyrano de Bergerac in modern story without his nose? By
the unlearned it is thought that the immortal Bardolph is a creation of
Shakspeare’s genius. Not so; an ingenious scholar long ago identified
him as an historical character who but for the poet’s fine appreciation
of noses might have blushed eternally unseen. It is nothing that his
true name is no longer in evidence in the annals of men; as Bardolph
his fame is secure from the ravening tooth of time.
Even when a nasal peculiarity is due to an accident of its environment
it confers no inconsiderable distinction, apart from its possessor’s
other and perhaps superior claims to renown, as in the instances of
Michael Angelo, Tycho Brahe and the beloved Thackeray, in whose altered
frontispiece we are all the more interested because of his habit of
dipping it in the Gascon wine.
The spreading nose of Socrates was no doubt a source of great regret
to him, whether its faults and failings were of Xanthippe’s making or,
as Zopyrus had the incivility to inform him, inherited from drunken,
thieving and lascivious ancestors; yet who would willingly forego the
emotions and sentiments inspired by that unusual nose? It seems a
precious part of his philosophy.
The connection between the poetic eminence of Ovid and the noses from
which his family, the Nasones, derived its name is doubtless more than
accidental, and to our knowledge of his hereditary nasal equipment,
albeit we know not the precise nature of the endowment, must be
ascribed a part of our interest in his work. He to whom the secret of
metamorphosis was an open book is not affirmed to have made any attempt
to alter the family feature, as he doubtless would have done had he not
recognized its essential relation to his genius.
Plutarch declares that Cicero owed his surname to the fact that
his nose had the shape of a vetch—_cicer_. Anyhow, his nose was as
remarkable as his eloquence, in its different way. Gibbon and the late
Prince Gortschakoff had noses uncommonly minute for men of commanding
ability, which may have been a good thing for them, compelling them to
rely upon their own endeavors to make their mark in the world. He who
cannot climb to eminence upon his own nose will naturally seek another
footing. Addison had a smooth Grecian nose, significantly suggestive
of his literary style. Tennyson’s nose was long; so are some of his
sermons in verse. Julius Cæsar, too, was gifted with a long nose, which
a writer in a recent review has aptly called “enterprising.” That Cæsar
was an enterprising man some of his contemporaries could feelingly have
attested.
The nose of Dante—ah, there was a nose! What words could do it justice?
It is one of history’s most priceless possessions. One hesitates to
say what powers and potencies lay latent in that superb organ; one
can only regret that he did not give more time to the cultivation of
its magnificent possibilities and less to evening up matters between
himself and his enemies when peopling Hell as he had the happiness to
conceive it.
Considering how many of the world’s great and good men have been
distinguished from their inferiors by noses of note and consequence, it
is difficult to understand that such “gifts of grace divine” as these
uncommon protuberances should be so sensitive to the blaze and blare of
publicity. One would expect that in the fierce light that beats about
an uncommon nose its fortunate owner would bask as contentedly as a
python in the noon-day sun, happy in the benign beam and proud of every
inch of his revealed identity.
To art, effacement of the nose will be of inestimable benefit. In
statuary, for example, we shall be able to hurl a qualified defiance
at Time the iconoclast, who now hastens to assail our cherished carven
images in that most vulnerable part, the nose, tweaking it off and
throwing it away almost before the sculptor’s own nose is blue and cold
beneath the daisies. In the statue of the future there will be no nose,
consequently no damage to it; and although the statue may when new and
perfect differ but little from the mutilated antiques that we now have,
there will be a certain satisfaction in knowing that it has not been
“retouched.” In the case of portrait-statues and busts the advantage
is obvious. When the nose goes the likeness goes with it; all men will
look pretty nearly alike, and a bust or statue will serve about as well
for one man as for another.
Perhaps the best effect of all will be felt in literature. To that
capital bore of letters, the scribbling physiognomist, the nose is
almost as necessary as to the caricaturist. He is never done finding
strength of mind and spirit in large noses, though the small ones of
Gibbon and Gortschakoff shrieked against his creed, and intellectual
feebleness in “pugs,” though Kosciusko’s was the puggest of its time.
When there are no noses the physiognomist can base no theories on them.
It would be worth something to live long enough to be rid of even a
part of his gabble.
The conditions under which we live may so alter that the sense of
smell may be again advantageous in the struggle for existence, and by
the survival of those in whom it is keenest regain its pristine place
in our meager equipment of powers and capacities. But philosophers
to whom millstones are transparent will deem it significant that the
sense in question and the facial feature devoted to its service have
fallen into something of the disrepute that foretokens deposal. It is
now hardly polite to speak of smells and smelling, without the use of
softened language; and the nose is frequently subjected to contumelious
and jocose remark unwarranted by anything in its personal appearance
or the nature of its pursuits. It is as if man had withdrawn his
lip-service from the nasal setting sun.
It is, then, well understood, even outside of “scientific circles,”
that the incompossibility of civilization and the human nose is
more than a golden dream of the optimist. Indubitably that once
indispensable organ is falling into the sere and yellow leaf of disuse,
and in the course of a few thousand generations will have been wiped
off the face of the earth. Its utility as an organ of sense decreases
year by year—except as a support for the kind of eyeglasses bearing
its name in French; not a sufficiently important service to warrant
nature in preserving it. The final effacement has been foreseen from
the earliest dawn of art. The ancient Grecian sculptors, for example,
who were great trimmers and were ever eager to know which way the
physiognomical cat would jump, tried to represent the human face of
the future rather than that of their period; and it is noticeable
that most of their statues and busts are distinguished by a striking
lack of nose, as above intimated. That is justly regarded as a most
significant circumstance—a prophecy of the conclusion now reached by
modern science working along other lines. The Coming Man is to be
noseless—that is settled; and there are not wanting those who support
with enthusiasm the doctrine that he is to be hairless as well.
It is to be observed that these two effects, planing down of the
human nose and uprooting of the human hair, are to be brought about
differently—at least the main agency in the one case is different from
that in the other. The nose is departing from among us because of its
high sense of duty. Most of the odors of civilization being distinctly
disagreeable, and in the selection of our food chemical analysis having
taken the place of olfactory investigation, there is little for the
modern nose to do that the modern nose-owner is willing to have done.
One of the most useful of all our natural endowments is what I may
venture to call the conscience of the organs. None of the bodily organs
is willing to be maintained in a state of idleness and dependence—to
eat the bread of charity, so to speak. Whenever for any cause one of
them is put upon the retired list and deprived of its functions and
just influence in the physical economy it begins to withdraw from the
scheme of things by atrophy. It withers away, and the place that knew
it knows it no more forever. That is what is occurring in the instance
of the human nose. We make very little use of it in testing our food—it
has, in truth, lost its cunning in that way—in tracking our game, or in
taking note of a windward enemy; albeit to most of the enemies of the
race the nose is almost as good an annunciator as the organs which they
more consciously address. So the idle nose is leaving us—more in sorrow
than in anger, let us hope.
With the hair the case is different. It goes, not merely because its
mandate is exhausted, but because it is really detrimental to us in
the struggle for existence. Its departure is an instance, pure and
simple of the survival of the fittest. Little reflection is required
to show the superior fitness of the man that is bald. Baldness is
respectability, baldness is piety, rectitude and general worth. Persons
holding responsible and well-salaried positions are commonly bald—bank
presidents especially. The prosperous merchant is usually of shining
pate; the heads of most of the great corporations are thinly thatched.
Of two otherwise equal applicants for a position of trust and profit,
who would not instinctively choose the bald one, or, both being bald,
the balder? Having, therefore, a considerable advantage, the bald
person naturally lives longer than his less gifted competitor (any one
can observe that he is usually the older) and leaves a more numerous
progeny, inheriting the paternal endowment of precarious hair. In a few
generations more those varieties of our species known as the Mophead
and the Curled Darling will doubtless have become extinct, and the
barber (_Homo loquax_) will have followed them into oblivion.
Another German physician (named Müller—the German physician who is
not named Müller has had a narrow escape) points out the increasing
prevalence of baldness and declares it hereditary. That many human
beings are born partly bald is not, I take it, what he means, but
that the tendency to lose the hair early in life is transmitted from
father to son. It is understood that the ladies have nothing to do
with the matter; they are never bald, but the hair of none of them, I
understand, is so long and thick as it once was.
It is difficult to offset such facts as these with facts of a contrary
sort. Cowboys and artists—sometimes poets—are found with long hair, but
long hair is not thought to be an advantage to them, if, indeed, any
hair at all is. For wiping the bowie-knife, the paint brush or the pen,
hair, no doubt, is useful, but hardly more so than the coat-sleeve.
Even in these instances, then, where at first thought there might seem
to be a relation of cause and effect between length of hair and length
of life, the appearance is fallacious. A bald-headed cowboy would,
however, be less liable to scalping by the Red Man. It appears, then,
that Dr. Müller’s cheerful prediction regarding the heads of Posterity
rests upon a foundation of truth.
Some of the doctor’s arguments, however, seem erroneous. For example,
he thinks the masculine fashion of cutting off the hair an evidence
that men instinctively know hair to be injurious—that is to say, a
disadvantage in the struggle for existence. This I can not admit;
it does not follow, for testators have a fashion of cutting off
legatees-expectant, yet legatees-expectant are not injurious—until
known to be cut off; and then the testator’s struggle for existence is
commonly finished. Capitalists have a fashion of cutting off coupons;
it hardly needs to be pointed out that coupons are not amongst the
malign influences tending to the shortening of life.
I have tried (with some success, I hope) to show that hair is a
disadvantage, but this view derives no support from the scissors. If
the hair of men were obviously, conspicuously beneficial; if it made
them healthy, wealthy and as wise as they care to be; if they needed
it in their business; if they could not at all get on without it—they
would doubtless cut it a little oftener and a little closer than they
do now. Men are that way.
The truth of the matter is plain enough. Men become bald because they
keep cutting their hair. Every man has a certain amount of capillary
energy, so to say. He can produce such a length of hair and no more,
as the spider can spin only so much web and then must cease to be a
spinster. By cutting the hair we keep it exhausting its allowance
of energy by growth; when all is gone growth stops, and the roots,
having no longer a use, decay. By letting their hair grow as long as
it will women retain it. The difference is the same as that between
two coils of rope, equal in length, one of which is constantly payed
out, the other not. If this explanation do not compose the immemorial
controversy about the cause of men’s baldness the prospect of its
composure by that phenomenon’s universality will be hailed with
delight by all who love a quiet life. The first generation to forget
that men ever had hair will be the first to know the happiness of
peace; the succeeding one will begin a dispute about the cause of hair
in woman.
An important discovery made and stated with confidence is that to
the human tooth, also, civilization is hateful and insupportable.
Dr. Denison Pedley, whose name carries great weight (and would to
whomsoever it might belong) examined the teeth of no fewer than 3,114
children, and only 707 had full sets of sound ones. That was in
England; what would be shown by a look-in at the mouths of the young
of a more highly civilized race—say the Missourians—one shudders to
conjecture. That nearly all the savages whom one meets have good
enough teeth is a matter of common observation; and missionaries in
some of the remoter parts of Starkest Africa attest this fact with
much feeling. Yet in all enlightened countries the prosperous dentist
abounds in quantity.
But perhaps the most significant testimony is that of another English
gentleman, with another honored name—J. K. Mummery, who examined every
skull that he could lay his eyes on during twenty years. He affirms
an almost total absence of _caries_ among the oldest specimens,
those belonging to the Stone Age. Among the Celts, who succeeded these,
and who knew enough to make metal weapons, but not enough to refrain
from using them, the decayed tooth was an incident of more frequent
occurrence; and the Roman conquest introduced it in great profusion.
When the Romans were driven out they took their back teeth along with
them, but the flawless incisor, the hale bicuspid are afterward rarely
encountered. Craniologists affirm a similar state of things wherever
there have been successive or overlapping civilizations: the skulls all
tell the same story—their vote is unanimous. If the alarming progress
of enlightenment be not stayed the hairless and noseless man of the
future will undoubtedly subsist, not as we, upon his neighbor, but upon
spoon-victuals and memories of the past.